Forget about the doctor, send for a priest

"Forget about the doctor. Send for a priest." says Kirk Douglas acting in the role of Detective McLeod.

Detective Story movie poster

Turner Classic Movies shows the 1951 movie, Detective Story, based on the Sidney Kingsley play, with Kirk Douglas in the title role.

At the end of the movie, after his wife (Eleanor Parker) has left him, Detective McLeod (Kirk Douglas), saves his fellow policemen in the squad room from a petty thief, Charley Gennini, who shoots him with a gun grabbed from another cop. Detective McLeod suffers in agony from a gut shot, meanwhile offering a man accused of fraud a second chance, and praying that his wife Mary will forgive him for not helping her when she begged for his help. McLeod's obsessive pursuit of an abortionist lead him to discover his wife had an abortion.


Then McLeod/Douglas makes the Sign of the Cross with a bloody hand and begins to pray the Act of Contrition – but dies in the act of praying.


Does writing get any better than this? 

The old man was once a twelve-year-old kid who heard his best friend's mother say:

"I am going to hell in a hand-basket, and I am pushing the cart."

The kid often helped his mother at the grocery store and he loved to push the shopping cart. He always meant to ask her what she meant. If heaven and hell are your choices, why choose hell?